Genesis

A/N: I don’t even know where to start with my thanks for this chapter, so I’ll dedicate it to everyone who’s at Portus this weekend and to all the Cinderellas who are at home, missing the ball. And of course my thanks to my betas, Anastasia, Machshefa, and Melenka.

This one's short, but the rest of the story will follow more quickly now. ~ Ari

In radiant moonlight, the two before the window cast a single shadow on the floor.

The eyes she turned to him were brimming full with unshed tears, and, in that moment, the soul he saw within them was one that any man might see.

Not the soul of a hero, who had sacrificed life so that others might live.

Nor the soul of a witch, who had revealed her secret in coding so arcane only he might comprehend, wrapped in language none but he understood.

Nor a soul on the edge of madness, tethered to sanity only by the force of his will.

No.

He saw the soul of a woman held, crying, in his arms.

Hermione moaned, and in her moan the hollow despair of a world built on a lie.

In a lesser silence, not even he could have caught the words in her cry.

“How could they?”

Yes. It was the right question.

He held her head close to his heart, pressing his cheek against the cold roughness of her hair, and he closed his eyes in a vain effort to blind himself to the piercing clarity of moonlight reflecting the truth of Godric’s Hollow on the bitter snow of the castle’s silent grounds.

“How?”

Knowing she deserved an answer, wishing desperately he had a better one to give, he opened his eyes to hers. “I don’t know, Hermione. I don’t know.”

A wisp of air through the arched windows caught a strand of her hair, and it fell across her cheek, and he watched her gaze turn inward to seek the only real answer she could ever receive.

---

The dragon backwinged delicately as it tried to determine whether or not it could land safely on the tiny ghost’s insubstantial shoulder.

Her eyes warmed, and she smiled.

Without knowing quite why, Neville stopped blinking as he watched.

Alighting carefully, the dragon held its wings outstretched for a moment until it was certain of its perch. Then, with a soft peep, it folded them and looked at Neville as if to say, “Well, what did you expect?”

Neville laughed, an easy sound of delighted surprise, and the smaller ghost beamed, holding her hand out to him.

“Where to, then?” he asked, finally blinking.

She gestured in the direction of the Hospital Wing, and, after a moment, his eyes widened.

Her smile deepened, and she nodded, taking his hand as firmly as the substance of mist and memory would allow.

---

When Hermione’s eyes returned to focus, Severus saw within them a resolve he only then realized had been absent since his return to the castle.

Startled, he was once again struck with a brief image of her as his student, but he quickly filed that image into the recesses of his mind, asking only, “So you’ve decided?”

“How did you know?”

“How did I know which?”

A brief flare of exasperation in her eyes. “That I’ve decided on a course of action regarding Horace, of course.”

Excellent. “Of course.”

“Although I shall expect answers to the myriad questions I have regarding my window – or, more precisely, why your spell had quite the opposite of its usual effect.”

“Naturally,” he drawled, something dawning in his heart – something any other man might have recognized as hope.

But Severus Snape was not a usual man, and hope held no quarter against immediate pragmatics. “So what is your decision? I presume we shall not spend the remaining moments before the Unspeakables arrive attempting to conceal the evidence of your…” Uncharacteristically, he hesitated, uncertain, lest he upset some delicate balance.

“My soul-breaking?” she said, her eyes flashing a challenge to the very concept of evasion.

He nodded.

She raised her chin slightly. “Let them find it.”

“They will know it was you,” he ventured neutrally, but inwardly, he held his breath.

A flash of pride. “Who else could it have been?”

“So… ?”

“I intend that they know, Severus,” she said, her voice as hard as the castle’s carved stone. “I intend that they know.”

Glorious. He raised a hand to the fallen strand of hair and traced the curve it made on her cheek, her neck, brushing his fingers to the back of her neck to release the rest from its haphazard knot.

And she shook her hair free, and she laughed, and, although it carried with it an echo of the Darkness that was permanently etched into her being, he heard within her laughter a note he had never expected to hear.

Hermione Granger was happy.

She’s mad.

She read his thoughts on his face looked at him seriously. “Perhaps I am mad. Perhaps not. I find that insanity, or the lack of it, is largely dependent on context, don’t you?”

A speculative gleam grew in his eyes. “Quite.”

She gestured toward her window. “Contexts can be changed.”

He nodded once, slowly, his lips curling into a predatory smile.

She laughed again.

He knew as no other could that she had but begun to come to terms with the loss she had wrought on herself by her silence, and that she would continue to face her memories in nightmares that, now, she would remember.

He knew, because his own returned nightly.

But he knew the word that would end them, and, after all, he had been her teacher.

Arrangement or no, he knew with absolute certainty that he would be there when she woke, sweating, shaking, unable to remember that the simplest spells were, finally, the most important.

That Reparo couldn’t erase a crack of truth in a façade of lies.

And that Lumos was the only cure, albeit a temporary one, for Darkness.

There were other, less literal ways to deal with Darkness.

His predatory look deepened, matched by the arrogant rippling of her cloak as she turned through the arched shadows.

As he followed her into the corridor, he found himself rather looking forward the Unspeakables’ reaction when she demanded the answer to the question whose truth they’d buried, along with her childhood, twenty-two years before.

---

Minerva’s steely eyes bored relentlessly into Dumbledore’s. “Fine, then; we can table that discussion for a century or so whilst you gather your wits.”

A shadow of relief threatened to turn smugly into twinkle, but it was swept away by her next words.

“What happens, Albus, when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?”

Dumbledore’s portrait began, ever so slightly, to sweat.